Virgin Earth (35 page)

John put his hand on the richly slashed sleeve of his master’s fine doublet. “But, my lord, if you fail?”

Buckingham did not throw him off, as he could have done; did not laugh, as John half-expected. Instead he put his white fingers on John’s hand, and held his touch closer. “I must not fail,” he said softly. “To tell you truth, John, I dare not fail.”

John looked into his master’s dark eyes. “Are you in so much jeopardy?”

“The worst. They will execute me for treason if they can.”

The two men stood still for a moment, hands clasped, their heads close.

“Come with me?” Buckingham asked.

“Of course,” John replied.

“You are going where?” Elizabeth demanded, icily furious.

“To France with the fleet,” John said, keeping his head low over his dinner. J, at the other end of the table, watched his parents in silence.

“You are nearly sixty.” Elizabeth’s voice trembled with rage. “It is time you stayed home. The duke pays you as his gardener and the keeper of his rarities. Why can he not leave you to garden?”

John shook his head and cut himself a slice of ham. “This is sweet meat,” he remarked. “One of our own?”

“Yes,” she snapped. “Why does the duke want you?”

“He has asked me to go,” John said in his most reasonable tone. “I can hardly ask him if he is sure, or what his reasons are. He has ordered me to go.”

“You are at an age when men sit by their fireside and tell their grandchildren of their travels,” she said. “Not going as a common soldier off to war.”

He was stung. “I’m not a common soldier. I travel as a gentleman in his train. As his companion and adviser.”

She slapped the table with her hand. “What can you advise him? You are a gardener.”

He met her challenging eyes squarely. “I may be a gardener but I have traveled farther and faced worse danger than any other in his train,” he said. “I was at the battle of Algiers, and the long voyage to Russia. I have traveled all over Europe. He needs all the wise heads he can muster. He has asked for me and I will go.”

“You could refuse,” she challenged him. “You could leave his service. There are many other places where you could work. We could go back to Canterbury; Lord Wootton would have you back. He says that no one can grow melons like you. We could go back to Hatfield and work for the Cecils again.”

“I will not be forsworn. I will not leave his lordship.”

“You took no oath,” she pressed him. “You think of yourself as his man and he treats you like a vassal right enough, but these are new times, John. The way you served Lord Cecil with such love and devotion is the old way. Other men work for Villiers for nothing more than their wages and they move on as it suits them. You could serve him like that. You could tell him that it does not suit you to go to war with him, and seek another place.”

He was genuinely shocked.
“I
tell him that it does not suit me to go to war when he is going? Tell him that it suits me to stay at home when he is fighting for my country in a foreign land?
I
to be a turncoat, having eaten his bread and lived in his house for five years? After he has paid me and trusted me, and employed my own son so he served his apprenticeship in one of the finest households in the land?
I
wait till now, till the worst moment of his life, to tell him that I was only here until it suited me to be elsewhere? This is not a matter of a wage, Elizabeth, it is a matter of faith. It is a matter of honor. It is a matter between my lord and me.”

J made a little impatient gesture, and then sat still. John did not even glance at him.

“Then serve him where you are placed,” Elizabeth said urgently. “Cleave to your master and do the work he employs you to do. Keep his cabinet of rarities, keep his gardens.”

“I am placed at his side,” John said simply. “Wherever he is, there I should be. Wherever that is.”

She swallowed her pride as it rose up, a wife’s pride, a jealous pride, stung by the devotion in his voice. She kept her temper with an effort. “I don’t want you running into danger,” she said quietly. “We have a good place here; I acknowledge our debt to the duke. You have a fine life here. Why d’you have to go away? And this time to make war against the French! You told me yourself what a court they have and what an army! What chance does the fleet have against them?” — “Especially commanded by the duke,” she thought but did not say it.

“He thinks that we will sail into a heroes’ welcome and sail home again,” John said. “The Protestants of La Rochelle have been under siege by the French government troops for months. When we relieve the siege we will free the Huguenots and slap Richelieu’s face.”

“And why should you slap Richelieu’s face?” she demanded. “He was an ally only months ago.”

“Policy,” John answered, concealing his ignorance.

She drew a breath as if she would draw in patience again. “And if it is not so easy? If the duke cannot slap Richelieu’s face, just like that?”

“Then the duke will need me,” John said simply. “If they have to build siege machines, or bridges, he will need me there.”

“You are a gardener!” she exclaimed.

“Yes!” he cried, goaded at last. “But the rest of them are poets and musicians! The officers are young men from the court who have never ridden out for anything more arduous than a day’s hunting, and the sergeants are drunkards and criminals. He needs at least one man in his train who can work with his hands and measure a length with his eye! Who in my lord’s train will guard him? Who can he trust?”

She got up from her stool and snatched up the platters from the table. John saw her blink away angry tears and he softened at once. “Lizzie…” he said gently.

“Are we never to be at peace together?” she demanded. “You are a young man no longer, John; will you never stay home? We have our son, we have our home, you have your great garden and your rarities. Is this not enough for you that you have to go chasing off halfway round the world to fight the French, who were our allies and friends only last year?”

He got up and went over to her. His knees ached, and he was careful to walk steadily without a limp. He put his arm around her waist. He could feel the warmth and softness of her body beneath her gray gown. “Forgive me,” he said. “I have to go. Give me your blessing. You will never make me sail without your blessing.”

She turned her troubled face toward him. “I can bless you and I can pray for the Lord to watch over you,” she said. “But I fear that you are sailing with bad company into a senseless fight. You will be badly commanded, badly ruled and poorly paid.”

Tradescant flinched back from her. “This is not a blessing, this is ill-wishing!”

Elizabeth shook her head. “It is the truth, John, and everyone in the country but you knows it. Everyone but you thinks that your duke is leading this country into war to spite Richelieu and to tease the King of France whom he cuckolded already. Everyone but you thinks he is showing off before the king. Everyone but you thinks he is a wicked and dangerous man.”

John was white. “I see you have been listening to the preachers and the gossips again,” he said. “This poison is not of your cooking!”

“The preachers speak nothing but the truth,” she said, confronting him at last. “They say that a new world is coming where men can share in the wealth of the country and that every man should have his share. They say that the king will see reason and give the country to his people when his adviser is thrown down. And they say that if the king will not turn against papist practices in his home, and ritual in his church, and poverty in his streets, then we should all go to make a new world of our own.”

“Virginia!” John mocked scathingly. “That was an investment of mine in a promising business. It was not a dream of a new world.”

“There is certainly no dreaming in this old world,” she flashed back. “Innocent men in the Tower, poor men taxed into paupers. Plague in the streets every summer, starvation in the country, and the richest king in the world riding around in silk with his Favorite riding beside him on a horse from Arabia.”

John put his hand under her chin and turned her face so that she was forced to meet his eyes. “This is treason,” he said firmly. “And I will not have it spoken in my house. I have struck J for less. Mark me well, Elizabeth, I will put you aside if you speak against my lord. I will turn you out if you speak against the king. I have given my heart and soul to the duke and the king. I am their man.”

For a moment she looked as if he had indeed struck her. “Say that again,” she whispered.

He hesitated; he did not know if she was daring him to repeat it, or if she simply could not believe her ears. But either way he could not back down before a woman. The chain of command from God to man was clear; a wife’s feelings could not disrupt the loyalty from man to lord to king to God. “I will put you aside if you speak against my lord,” John said to his wife, as solemnly as he had spoken the marriage oath in church that long-ago day in Meopham. “I will turn you out if you speak against the king. I have given my heart and soul to the duke and the king. I am their man.”

He turned on his heel and went out of the room. Elizabeth heard his heavy step going up the stairs to their bedroom and then the noise of the wooden chest opening as he took his traveling suit from where it was laid in lavender and rue. She put out her hand to the chimney breast to steady herself as her knees grew suddenly weak beneath her, and she sank down to the little three-legged stool at the fireside.

“I want to go with him,” J suddenly said from his seat at the table.

Elizabeth did not look around. She had forgotten her son was there. “You’re too young,” she said absently.

“I’m nearly nineteen, I am a man grown. I could keep him safe.”

She looked up at his bright hopeful face and his dark eyes, as dark as his father’s. “I cannot bear to let you go,” she said. “You stay home with me. This voyage is going to break hearts enough in this household and in others all over the country. I can’t risk you as well.” She saw the refusal in his face. “Ah, John, don’t waste your time reproaching me or trying to convince me,” she suddenly cried out bitterly. “He won’t take you. He won’t allow you to go. He will want to be with the duke alone.”

“It is always the duke,” J said resentfully.

She turned her face from her son to look into the fire. “I know,” she said. “If I had been able to hide from that knowledge before, I would certainly know it now. Now that he has told me to my face and repeated it — that he is their man and not mine.”

Elizabeth did not come to see the fleet sail from Stokes Bay near Portsmouth. It was too far from Essex, and besides she did not want to see her husband walking up the narrow gangplank to his master’s ship, the
Triumph,
supervising the loading of his master’s goods. On this warlike expedition Buckingham was taking a full-sized harp with a harpist, a couple of milk cows, a dozen laying hens, a massive box of books for reading in his leisure hours and an enormous coach with livery for his servants for his triumphant progress through La Rochelle.

Watching this fanciful equipment lumbering up the gangplank, John was rather relieved that Elizabeth was not with him. Six thousand foot soldiers slouched unwillingly aboard the fleet, a hundred cavalry. The king himself rode down to Portsmouth for a farewell dinner with his Lord High Admiral, and bade him farewell with a dozen kisses, wishing him Godspeed on his mission.

The mission itself remained uncertain. Firstly they were to harry French shipping as they sailed to La Rochelle, but, as it happened, though the July seas were calm and pleasant they saw no French shipping and could not complete their orders. Buckingham’s court played cards for desperately high stakes and held a poetry competition as they sailed southward. There was a good deal of hard drinking and laughter.

The next part of the orders bade them to go to La Rochelle for the grateful welcome of the besieged townspeople. Even this apparently simple command could not be fulfilled. When the fleet hove to before the town and spread the pennants so that the town could see that the great duke himself had come to relieve the siege, the townspeople were neither grateful nor particularly welcoming. They were deep in complicated and subtle negotiations with Richelieu’s agents for their rights to practice their religion, and to live freely among other Frenchmen. The arrival of Buckingham’s fleet threw their diplomatic agreements into jeopardy.

“So we can go home with honor,” John suggested. He was standing at the back of Buckingham’s richly decorated cabin. Seated around the table were his advisers, French Protestant leaders among them.

“Never! We must show that we are serious,” Soubise the Frenchman said. “We should take the Ile de Rhé at the harbor mouth and then they will see we are in earnest. It would give them the courage to declare against Richelieu, break off these negotiations and defy him.”

“But our orders were to wait for them to declare,” John said levelly. “Not stir up trouble. The townspeople must invite our help. And if they do not declare against Richelieu, we were ordered to sail to Bordeaux and escort the English wine fleet home. We need not fight for La Rochelle, if the townspeople do not invite us.”

The Frenchman tried to catch Buckingham’s eye. “My lord duke did not come all this way to fetch a wine fleet home,” he laughed.

“Nor to find himself embroiled in a quarrel which no one wants,” John said stoutly.

Buckingham lifted his head from admiring a large new diamond on his finger. “Are you homesick, John?” he asked coldly.

Tradescant flushed. “I am your man,” he said steadily. “Nothing else. And I don’t want to see you drawn into a battle for a small island opposite a small town on a small river in France.”

“This is La Rochelle!” Soubise exclaimed. “Hardly a small town!”

“If they are not willing to fight for themselves,” John persisted doggedly, “then why should we fight for them?”

“For glory?” Buckingham suggested, smiling across the room at John.

“You are glorious enough,” John smiled back, indicating the new diamond, and a shining stone in Buckingham’s thick plumed hat on the table before him.